Backyard

When I was a kid, we had the above enormous backyard. (This picture of the back half of our backyard is courtesy of Trulia, a badass real estate site with pictures and occasionally prices of houses all over the country. Want to know how much your friend spent on his or her house? You might be able to find out).

My brother came to adopt the alley as his territory, but I took over the row of bushes on the left that I had decided formed a playhouse. The bushes seemed to form two bedrooms, a hallway, a front door, a back door, and a living room with a "couch" created by a fallen tree. I would get one bedroom, and my best friend would get the other. For some reason, I decided the living room was sinister and was scared to go into it.

Anyway, because of my own haunted backyard, I love stories about haunted backyards. Like The Secret Garden. And The Shining. And Beloved. And this kid's book called The Shades where shadows come alive in the garden. And I love that this guy has created his own haunted yard, including this Spirited Away sculpture. Despite all those, I still think the backyard is a neglected space in haunted stories, which doesn't make any sense. The backyard's ripe for unsettling things.